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22.6.13

Cherry and Dark Chocolate Ice Cream ‒ Kirsikka-tummasuklaajäätelö

Being a child of warmness and light, I love the way how these nightless nights try their best to compensate the darkness and heaviness of winter. It's no accident that the more north you go the more metalheads there are. It's a bit disturbing sometimes to realise that the Portuguese guy dressed in black and chains, who you just met, is really a representer of a scared and ridiculed marginal group, when you're used to this stuff being completely mainstream. This applies inside Finland too: there are more dedicated metal music listeners in Oulu than there are in Helsinki.

But for me, heavy music is an inseparable part of the light of midsummer too. I've spent most of my adulthood midsummers in a heavy festival Nummirock, held in the middle of nowhere by the village's farmer society, because the atmosphere is the friendliest and most peace-loving I've seen in any mass event, coming from both the audience and the workers, who tend to overlap. So this morning I had to put on some black metal.

The plus side in listening the stuff at your own home is that you can have dark, homemade ice cream while you're at it! This time I tried making the base from nut cream for the first time, but this would work just as well with oat or soy cream. Also, this was the first time I tried my flatmate's ice cream machine instead of making the stuff by hand like I normally do. The plus side was of course that it happened more quickly but on the other hand, the stuff never ended up as cold and thick as I had hoped for. From what I've gathered from different net forums, apparently if you're going to use a machine for the job you should buy a good one, good in this case meaning expensive. But can't whine, all of this disappeared quicklier than you can growl the name.

Blend the nuts together with the water. This works easier if you've let them soak for the previous night. Mix in the jam and the chocolate powder. Chop the chocolate. Remove the cherry stones and quarter the cherries. You can add the cherries and the chocolate now or at the very end of the process. Pour the stuff into your ice cream maker and follow its instructions.